


so long, we'd become the flowers

by milominderbinder



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e12, M/M, Quentin Coldwater's S4 Mental State, References to Depression, basically just quentin talking about fillory and the mosaic timeline and eliot, quentin centric, quentin yells at a plant: the fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-11
Packaged: 2020-01-11 18:21:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18429566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milominderbinder/pseuds/milominderbinder
Summary: There’s how much Fillory meant to him when it was just a fictional place in his favourite book, and there’s how much he hurt when he came here in real life and found out how broken all that actually was.  But also -- there’s something else.  There’s a third branch to Q’s feelings about this land.Not the first time Quentin set foot in Fillory, but the first time Fillory had Quentin in it.When he went to the past.  With Eliot.Maybe he can tell the plant aboutthat.





	so long, we'd become the flowers

**Author's Note:**

> y'all. i'm new to this show and i'm Obsessed and i had such high hopes for last episode and then tHAT happened !! anyway, i still have hopes that like,,, well, qualice was so out of the blue and had like a 2 second scene so SURELY the writers are building to a plot twist, right?? but mostly the thing that annoyed me most was that after a whole season where q's primary drive has been getting eliot back, he barely Mentioned him this ep?? and i actually did love the scene with the plant & quentin, but i couldn't help thinking how much potential it had to be the Catharsis™ quentin so desperately needs if he'd used that scene to talk about eliot & how much he needs him back,, so,,,, i banged out this fic to see what that would look like. enjoy!

So this is what it’s come down to.  After months -- misery, pain, planning, hurting, secret planning, researching instead of sleeping, minding the monster instead of eating, pushing himself to the point where he thinks any given moment could be the one his whole self just decides to give up and  _ collapse  _ \-- after all of that, this is what it comes down to.

He has to talk to a flower.

Because of course he does.  Because of course.  It’s Fillory, and everything always has to be the exact  _ wrong  _ amount of momentous.  And it has to be Quentin, because being a nerd who developed an unhealthy attachment to a set of children’s books to deal with your clinical depression is apparently the  _ number one  _ qualification for heroic tasks these days.  After the last few months, Quentin already feels hollow -- he feels like everything about him has been scooped out, and he’s just clinging to familiar patterns for the sake of them, at this point.  He would be desperate for comfort if he had enough energy to feel desperate, but he doesn’t. He has nearly, so  _ so  _ very nearly that you couldn’t split the atom between him and the line, given up on all of this.  Earlier today, he kissed Alice, because he’s drowning and she’s familiar and was  _ there _ and Q thought about simpler times in their first year at Breakbills and thought to himself,  _ well, maybe I could still have this.  S _ ince then, all the day has done is gone to hell, but that's all any days do lately.

Now, he has to summon up love for a place that has nearly killed every single thing which matters to him.  A place which twisted his passion and ruined his innocence and made him watch people die and stare the worst parts of himself in the face and make hard choices he never wanted to make.

But he has to do this, to save Eliot and Jules and, like, maybe the whole world too.  

So Quentin takes a breath, and thinks about good memories in Fillory.

The problem is, when he stepped foot in Fillory with Julia that very first time after a lifetime of dreaming about it, he was struck with wonder and an overwhelming, childlike love -- but at the same time, it had already been ruined. By seeing the ghost of Martin Chatwin as a child, by knowing what the author who had shaped his whole life had really been doing, what the books that saved his life actually  _ stood  _ for.  Quentin had loved Fillory, but he’d also hated it for everything it was bringing back then, and everything it represented about the end of his own innocence.  So he doesn’t know how to talk about that.  He tries, just so briefly, after sending Plover out of the room to at least get  _ some  _ respite .  He tries to tell the plant how complex Fillory is to him now.  How much he used to love, and how much has gone to shit.

Predictably, it doesn’t work.  Quentin is fraught with restless rage and built up anxiety, fizzing into every part of his body as he paces in front of this stupid fucking flower, trying not to think about how the fate of everything he loves lays on him doing  _ this.   _ He scrubs a hand over his face, takes a deep breath, tries to centre himself in the way his old therapists used to get him to do when he was having panic attacks.  This is not a panic attack, this is more like an  _ everything  _ attack, but he thinks maybe the breathing will at least give him a bit of clarity.

And.  Well.  The thing is, there’s how much Fillory meant to him when it was just a fictional place in his favourite book, and there’s how much he hurt when he came here in real life and found out how broken all that was.  But also -- there’s something else.  A third branch to Q’s feelings about this land.

Not the first time Quentin set foot in Fillory, but the first time  Fillory had Quentin in it. 

When he went to the past.

With Eliot.

Even thinking Eliot’s name sends a clenching feeling through a raw, painful void in Q’s chest these days, but thinking about that timeline, their whole life in the mosaic quest -- he can’t ever hate that.  No matter how much the quest frustrated them, no matter how painfully it ended, no matter how much the rejection afterwards was one of the worst things he’d ever felt.  He can’t hate it.

The memories of those years live in a different sort of place in Quentin’s head than most. It’s not the same as remembering things from the actual past, which makes sense, since he still doesn’t know how he and Eliot remember it at all.  It’s more like -- a painting someone’s done in his head. Thick brush strokes laying down the primary colours of those years.  He doesn’t remember many specific days, individual moments, but he has the  _ feelings _ .  

That’s what it mostly is.  Feeling.  Half a century worth of it.  He knows the emotion which rushed through him when his lips first touched Eliot’s there.  How bittersweet it had felt to realise they may never get back to their old lives.  How confused he’d been about what he and Eliot were to each other there, something that had become more of a puzzle to him than the mosaic itself after a while, because they were sometimes kissing and sometimes more but never enough to call it regular, always  _ just  _ too little to put a familiar label on.  And how it had carried on like that until eventually, in the comfort of aging, the confusion had faded into only acceptance, affection, security; a deep knowledge that no matter what they were to each other, where the line was drawn between officially being together or being best friends sharing a deep romance without really mentioning it, they were still  _ partners _ .  He knows how it felt when his son burst into the world.  The first time he’d held a grandchild. The way half of his soul had fallen right out of him the moment he felt Eliot die, after a lifetime together.  The way that losing him hadn’t changed a drop of the love in Quentin’s heart.

After that whole lifetime of feeling, Quentin can hate the Fillory he’d first known, but he can’t hate the Fillory that had first known him.

He looks at the plant again, and is aware he’s been quiet for a while.  He’s forgotten whether there are still people behind him or not, and everything he’d thought about saying before.  The Fillory  _ books _ aren’t important to him right now.  Something altogether different is.

“There is someone,” Quentin says, his voice a fraction of what it had been when he was yelling a minute ago, like all the anger has settled right through him and poured out of his feet into the ground below, “Who means more to me than anyone else in this world.”

He takes a breath, and in his mind, he thinks of  _ peaches and plums _ , and the look in Eliot’s eyes for just that tiny moment in the park; the moment Quentin knew all hope wasn’t lost.  The moment that brought him here, really.

“He’s who I need this for.  Getting this flower -- getting  _ you _ to bloom is the only way I can save his life.  I have no other options, I have tried  _ everything _ , and I’m -- I am so fucking tired.”  He nearly laughs at even saying that aloud, like everyone didn’t know it already, but never once during all this has Quentin let himself say aloud how  _ bad _ these months have been. He is tired. He has a reason to be.  “I have a bond with him that I can’t explain in words. I think if he dies, after all this, after how much hell we’ve been through and how many times I’ve lost him before -- I think if he dies, I’ll die too.”

It’s the first time he’s said that aloud, too, even though he’s thought it a thousand times.  Eliot may not want Quentin the way Quentin hoped, but Q would rather live in a world with Eliot just as a friend, with Eliot even as a stranger, even as an  _ enemy _ , than live in a world with no Eliot at all.  He can't live in a world with no Eliot at all.  That's no sort of world.

One more breath, and he looks right at that dumb fucking flower, and he says it. “I love him.  In whatever way you want that to mean, I love him like he's a whole  _part_ of me.  And Fillory is the place where that happened.”

Behind him, a muffled noise. But Quentin barely notices it.  Now that he’s said it, now that he’s really  _ said it _ , a flood of confidence has washed over him; he thinks he can do this, now.  He can give this flower what it wants. He has to, because failing isn’t an  _ option _ .  Nothing outside of him and this ridiculous plant matters in this moment.

“Fillory is -- it’s complex.  It was created half at random, filled with chaos by a drunk god who was mostly just, like, horny and bored.  It’s not  _ supposed _ to be pure the way I always wanted it to be when I was a kid.  But as much as it’s about capriciousness, and chaos, and pain, and life being fundamentally unfair, Fillory is about  _ love _ , too.”  His heart is beating too hot under his skin, and Q shrugs off his hoodie in a fit of restless motion, scrapes a hand through his hair to soften his trembles.  Why does this feel like the hardest thing he's ever had to say?  “I spent a lifetime in Fillory. It may have been wiped out of this timeline, but it still happened. I -- I learned what family really is, here. I learned how to love someone so deeply that you don’t even care what form it takes, because it runs through _every_ part of you.  And at the end of all that, a  _ divine  _ fucking  _ quest _ decided that the life we’d spent together was -- was fucking  _ beautiful _ enough to represent the beauty of  _ all life _ .  And that happened in Fillory.  That  _ must _ count for something.  I have to believe that counts for something, between me and this land.”

Quentin thinks about those soft, feeling-memories all the damn time, but he hasn’t mentioned it, hasn’t spoken to a single soul about their life at the mosaic, since right after they remembered it and Eliot turned him down.  Q doesn’t even think he realised until right this moment how much he’d  _ wanted  _ to talk about it.  He knows the Quentin who lived that life wasn’t him, it doesn’t even really feel like it was, but he also knows that it was real, and that he is going to carry it with him, and everything that means, for as long as he lives.  And finally he's getting to say it out loud, and he just -- 

“I love Eliot.  And the way that I love him is so tied up in Fillory that I could never extricate the two.  Everything I love about him started here, and it’s Fillory that _let_ me love him.  It gave me the space, and the time, and everything that was so beautiful about our life together.  So Fillory is in my heart, for good, the same way he is.  And if -- if you can understand how much he means to me, you’ll get how much I love Fillory, too.  He’s -- it’s like he’s half of my soul.  Fillory gave me that.”

There are maybe tears building in the corners of Quentin’s eyes, but everything about him feels too raw and open and desperate to even notice.  It does occur to him, just in the back of his mind, that his voice has been getting louder the whole time he’s been talking, that it’s filled with  _ everything  _ he’s feeling, but also that, for the first time in what feels like far too long, he  _ is  _ feeling.  He hasn’t been able to handle the last few months without letting himself drift into the deepest parts of his depression, the sort that apathy comes with, the sort where pure exhaustion wipes out everything you are and everything you want and you just let life  _ happen  _ to you.  Right now, though -- right now, it feels like a part of him just came back.  

He realises, with a cool feeling sweeping down through his chest like water and bringing almost calmness with it, that he’s said everything he needs to.  

So he takes one more breath, slow and steady, and finishes: “And -- when I was a kid, reading about Fillory saved my life.  But the real Fillory  _ gave  _ me a life.  I love Fillory.  I do.  After everything, you  _ have  _ to believe that.”

He’s done.  It’s all he can say.  It’s -- his soul, bared.  His life, bared. His love for those books and his graceless fall from innocence when he found out too much truth and his slow climb, with one helping hand, back towards how he used to feel.  It’s everything Quentin has.

And if this flower doesn’t fucking bloom --

He allows himself to think of Eliot, just for one moment, trapped with a monster wearing his body and coming closer to killing it forever with each new day, and Quentin feels  _ despair.   _ If this doesn’t fucking work, how is he meant to save him?  And if he doesn’t save Eliot, how is anything in the world supposed to ever matter again?

And then --

A spot of green.

Quentin swallows the burning tears in his throat and moves closer, watches, unblinking, barely daring to breathe through his hope.

The flower has listened to him, and the flower has seen him right down to his soul, right through to his love, which is the centre of everything Quentin Coldwater has always been. 

The flower blooms.

**Author's Note:**

> i mostly wrote this just to Write It but i hope y'all enjoyed too! leave a comment if u are also dying over what direction they're taking this now ugh
> 
> also i have a magicians blog now: [disasterbiquentin](https://disasterbiquentin.tumblr.com) if u wanna come scream with me there


End file.
